1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to navigation equipment and more specifically to combinations of portable global positioning system receivers and two-way telephone personal pagers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Voice mail and pagers are now encountered by most people who use a telephone in the United States. Ordinary pagers allow the telephone numbers of callers who left a call-back number to be digitally broadcast to all the pagers in a service area by a pager hub station. The particular pager subscriber being called is the only one that sees the call-back number on their display. A serial number is used to sort through all the broadcasts and to select only those intended for a particular subscriber. Some pagers allow short text messages to be included with the call-back number. A derivative service broadcasts stock quotes to its subscribers that have ticker-tape stock displays in their mobile pocket units.
A new two-way pager service will allow pager subscribers to communicate back to the pager hub. Short messages can be encoded for delivery by the pager hub to another pager or a telephone number.
In a seemingly unrelated part of the present technology environment, global positioning system (GPS) receivers conventionally compute the navigational position of the receiver itself. In certain group settings where the positions of various remote or mobile stations needs to be constantly updated, e.g., to a dispatcher, such positions are commonly reported periodically by voice over a radio channel in layman's terms, such as street addresses or highway intersections.
Many business, technical and military organizations could benefit from an automatic method of collecting the position of each individual remote station and any base station and by the distributing of such member network positions to all. For example, public safety would benefit if police and fire dispatchers were equipped with GPS receiver base stations that could receive the current positions periodically of squad cars and fire engines. Other dispatching functions, such as parcel pick-up and delivery could also better coordinate their assets and service where the location of mobile units were readily available.